OUT OF CHARACTER

Are personality tests at all science-based? Why do we set such store in them?

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, is the most popular personality test in the world – more than 2 million people take it every year. Yet the two women who developed the test were not psychologists, and most of the assumptions were based on Jung’s untested findings from 1920. Are personality tests outdated? And why do we put so much faith in them? erhaps you were bored at work and killed some time doing a BuzzFeed quiz. (Okay, seven BuzzFeed quizzes: once you know which

Game of Thrones character you are, it’s hard not to wonder in which city you should live based on your taste in cheese.) Maybe you signed up for career counselling. Or perhaps it was part of a mandatory office workshop – some jobs require you to take a psychometric test as part of the interviewing process. Odds are at some point in your life you have taken a personality test.

People have been trying to sort one another into easyto-understand boxes for thousands of years. According to the Greek physician Hippocrates, there were four basic temperaments: you were innately choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic or sanguine. (I’ll just go ahead and crack open a nice Chard in case I qualify as melancholic – white wine was prescribed to all the melancholy folks ‘to counteract the black bile’. Prevention is better than cure, as they say.)

Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach famously used inkblots to get a peek into people’s psyche. Although his European colleagues dismissed his test as contrived and superficial, it captured the imagination of Americans and grew enormously in popularity in the 1930s and ’40s. They saw it as ‘a foolproof X-ray of a personality’ thanks to Freud’s prevailing theory that most of our desires, fears and fantasies are subconscious.

By 1950, another psychoanalytic test had come into play: the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), which uses evocative drawings to reveal, according to its co-creator Henry Murray, ‘the darker, blinder recesses of the psyche’.

Meanwhile, another test was steadily gaining popularity, mainly in the workplace…

TYPECASTING

If the personality test you took was in some sort of work-related setting, more than likely it was the MyersBriggs Type Indicator (MBTI), hands down the most popular personality test in the world. Every year, more than 2 million people take the MBTI. It is used by universities and corporates, and at self-help seminars and wellness retreats.

The Myers-Briggs test (sorry, ‘indicator’ – they are adamant that it is not a test) has been widely used since the 1940s. It consists of 93 questions with two possible answers: A or B. At the end, you are assigned one of 16 personality types based on four binaries. The first letter is either I or E (introvert or extrovert), the second either N or S (intuition or sensing), the third either T or F (thinking or feeling) and the fourth either P or J (perceiving or judging).

For some, the results are vaguely interesting, like a star sign; others wear their MBTI acronym with pride… also like a star sign. Maybe you put it on your Tinder account bio. Maybe you use every opportunity to gloat about the fact that you’re an INFJ, the rarest of the 16 personality types. Maybe, like me, you just googled ‘Hitler MBTI type’ and went down a rabbit hole of theories, one of which

is that he was a ‘misguided’ INFJ – the same as Mother Theresa. (Deep breaths. Let’s just agree that the internet is a dark place and move on.)

Interestingly, landing an I instead of an E was seen as a more desirable outcome in the ’50s and ’60s. ‘There was something very suspicious about the extrovert,’ writes Merve Emre, author of What’s Your Type? The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. ‘The extrovert is the people-pleaser, the social man, the superficial one. And the introvert is the serious, creative intellectual who commands respect because he or she will not change to meet the demands of others.’

By the 1970s, attitudes had changed, bringing about what Emre calls ‘the age of the extroverts’ – a bias that continues to this day.

ENTJ has become notorious for being the ‘CEO type’. Donald Trump is said to be one, as is Bill Gates and… again, Hitler. According to the MBTI definition, they are ‘frank, decisive, assume leadership readily. Quickly see illogical and inefficient procedures and policies; develop and implement comprehensive systems to solve organisational problems.’

A MURKY HISTORY

Here’s what you probably didn’t know about the MBTI. First of all, Myers and Briggs were a mother-daughter team. Katharine Cook Briggs, born in 1875, gave birth to Isabel Briggs Myers in 1897.

If you’re waiting for me to list their academic credentials, you are flat out of luck – they didn’t have any. To be fair, it was the early 1900s; career opportunities for women were thin on the ground. Inspired by the work of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Katharine started cataloguing personality differences when Isabel was four, and Isabel formalised her mum’s research, copyrighting it in 1943. Sadly, she didn’t live to see it really take off – Isabel died in 1980, just as the test was gaining popularity.

Today, personality testing is a billion-dollar industry, and most of the Fortune 500 companies sign up their employees. Big players in the US like AT&T, Exxon and General Electric use it ‘to identify job applicants whose skills match those of their top performers’, writes Annie

Murphy Paul in her book The Cult of Personality. According to Brian McCann, a sales consultant for the MBTI, it’s widely used in the State Department, the CIA and the US military. ‘There’s a story that goes around that says if you’ve risen to the rank of major in the army, you’ve taken the MBTI at least once,’ he says.

According to the Myers-Briggs company, ‘The MBTI instrument is the best known and most trusted personality assessment on the market… backed up by 70 years of rigorous research.’

Best known? Sure. Trusted? Not so much. Despite its massive, enduring popularity, the MBTI has many flaws. One is that it presupposes that some traits are innate and unchangeable: hardwired dispositions that you are born with. Meanwhile, even the company that publishes the MBTI has admitted that half the people who take the test a second time (sometimes just five weeks later) end up being categorised as a different type. Another key issue is that many of us land somewhere on the spectrum between two opposites rather than being wholly in one camp or another. Not everything is either/or. It might be that you make some decisions based on emotion and others based on logic. Maybe you are introverted at work and extroverted in social settings, or vice versa. In fact, most people are ambiverts, landing somewhere between introvert and extrovert. Although the early ideas are based on his findings, Jung himself admitted, ‘There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.’ ‘There’s just no evidence behind it,’ says organisational psychologist Adam Grant. ‘The characteristics measured by the test have almost no predictive power on how happy you’ll be in a situation, how you’ll perform at your job, or how happy you’ll be in your marriage.’ One researcher called it ‘an act of

irresponsible armchair philosophy’.

Annie Murphy Paul also notes that personality-ty children is problematic, as it puts ‘limiting labels on young people who are still developing a sense of themselves and their capacities’. The same could be said of adults.

It seems there are even some non-believers within their own ranks. The company that publishes the test has a few high-profile psychologists on its board, none of whom use the MBTI in their research. ‘I used it practically, but I didn’t use it in any of my research,’ Stanford psychologist and board member Carl Thoresen admitted to The Washington Post in 2012. ‘In part because it would be questioned by my academic colleagues. That was always a barrier.’

Despite its flaws, the Myers-Briggs doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. ‘I don’t really see it going away,’ Merve Emre told The Guardian. ‘I mean, it’s really survived attack after attack.’

So why the allure? Personality tests provide ‘an unwavering self-conception, a foundation for relating to others, a plan for success and an excuse for failure,’ Paul writes. Dr Jennifer V Fayard, an associate professor of psychology at Ouachita Baptist University, sums it up even more succinctly: ‘We want to feel like we belong; we want to learn something we didn’t know about ourselves; and we want easy ways to categorise people.’

A POSITIVE SPIN

Here’s the thing about the MBTI: it won’t tell you anything too bad about yourself, which is probably one of the underlying reasons for its popularity. Remember that description of the ENTJ from before? Hitler isn’t evil – he’s ‘decisive’. Trump isn’t lacking in compassion – he’s ‘frank’. Each personality type has its own unique and constructive strengths, so no matter your results, you can put a positive spin on them.

Some other up-and-coming tests, on the other hand, might reveal aspects of your personality that aren’t as appealing.

The Big Five personality test, for instance, singles out five key factors that underpin personality, and there’s just one that overlaps with the Myers-Brigg theory: extroversion. The Big Five can be summed up by the acronym OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Now imagine telling the CEO of the company that hired you to perform a personality test that it reveals him or her to be disagreeable and highly neurotic. That should go down well.

The Big Five’s premise is fairly simple: it doesn’t sort you into a specific box – it shows you where you

and on a spectrum. Which is probably why it’s not as popular: there aren’ ny big revelations. It also doesn’t give you a sexy title to describe yourself with, as with some variations of the MBTI: The Architect, or The Defender or The Adventurer.

‘In a way, it’s disappointing,’ says Dr Simine Vazire, a professor of psychology at the University of California. ‘It just means that a personality test can tell you only what

you tell it.’

Despite the fact that most psychologists today consider The Big Five as the best attempt to derive personality types from empirical data, the test also has a ‘commercial’ problem: ‘There’s no individual or group who owns it,’ Adam Grant says. ‘It’s something that’s collectively owned by the academic community.’ As a result, it’s harder to copyright, package… and sell to big corporates.